APT - Personality Disorders Lesson
Personality Disorders
People suffering from personality disorders have traits that are inflexible and maladaptive across a wide range of situations, impeding their ability to function normally in society. These maladaptive traits dominate the individual's personality. Symptoms are evident by adolescence or young adulthood and are characterized by deviation from accepted social norms, distressful to the person or to others, and causing dysfunction to the person's life or to others' lives.
Personality Disorders fall into three clusters based on their dominant disordered characteristic:
- Odd/eccentric characteristics
- Anxiety-related characteristics
- Dramatic/impulsive characteristics
The most famous and widely researched type of personality disorder is antisocial personality disorder, which is typically reported in the news as psychopathic or sociopathic behavior (which are psychological descriptions). This disorder falls under the category of dramatic/impulsive. A person with antisocial personality disorder displays a lack of conscience, willingly hurting others through lying, stealing, fighting, or other aggressive behaviors. These people do not feel guilty for their harmful behaviors, typically believing that each person must look out for himself and that people who can't defend themselves deserve to be hurt. Many serial killers have been diagnosed with this disorder, and other people with the disorder might become con artists, ruthless businesspersons, petty criminals, or jobless. Most criminals do not fall in this category because they show remorse for their actions or show responsibility in other areas of their lives. Only a person who shows no conscience falls into this category.
There are other categories of disorders in the DSM-5. A category called Feeding and Eating Disorders includes disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. The Sleep-Wake Disorders category includes restless leg syndrome and sleep apnea. A new category called Gender Dysphoria includes people who express "a strong desire to be of the other gender or an insistence that he or she is the other gender." The Somatic Symptom category includes a diagnosis for people who experience anxiety about possibly getting sick, experience medically unexplainable pain, or other related issues. A category for Dissociative Disorders includes diagnosis for disruptions in states of consciousness, like people with multiple identities or amnesia not caused by medical conditions. There are also categories for impulse control, addiction, and several others.
Complete the personality and other disorders review activity below:
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